Bamboo and other vegetable cane are very fibrous and popular for use as building and textile materials. The cylindrical bamboo stalks or culms have a plurality of nodes spaced apart along their length, and these nodes create substantial difficulties in processing the culms without damaging or shredding the long fibers between the nodes. For example, bamboo culms have been harvested and processed by hand using an ax or the like to break the nodes and slice the culms longitudinally to allow the culms to be flattened. This conventional hand processing of bamboo culms is inefficient and very labor-intensive. There is a need for improvements in processing bamboo to provide substantially flat sheets of the fibrous material while allowing the material to remain joined together in a planar configuration after splitting the culms longitudinally.